So, this Dreamwidth thing...

[johnridley]

I just clicked on a link to go check it out, since it's passed my "well, people have been talking about it for over a year now" "not a flash fad" filter.

Uh, it's a clone of LiveJournal. So why are people setting up both LJ and DW accounts? What's the point? I don't get it. Unless people are really excited that it's open source or something.

Comments

[sraun]

From what I can tell, what's really exciting people is that the founders have made promises concerning future actions (more specifically, promises to not do certain things) that are considered credible by my friends or friends-of-friends. Basically, they've promised to not do a bunch of stuff that LJ has done in search of income / profitability, but which annoy the users. Some of this combines to create a space that is very friendly to certain types of on-line fandoms. It's currently considered the LJ-clone to run away to if LJ has finally hit enough of your buttons that you don't want anything to do with it any more, but still want something like the feature set.

Last I looked, I've got some invite codes if you'd like one.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

OK. I remember there being a few issues in the past, but ISTR that they were all just "oh no, the Russians bought SixApart, they're surely gonna can LiveJournal now!" fear. I don't recall anything actually changing, and it doesn't seem to me like LJ is any different now than it was 5 years ago.

Last time I set up a mirror of my account over on InsaneJournal.com (plus a local copy) where it remains. I didn't see any reason to jump ship and lose years of comments (I could have easily copied the actual entries) just on the basis of fear.

I have a cron job on my Linux box that copies over new entries every 15 minutes or so. If anyone wants me to set up the same for them (I'm using an LJ API library, so I assume my code will work for any LiveJournal code base, including DreamWidth) just let me know. If LJ ever does become uninhabitable, pushing to an IJ/DW account after that point won't be any harder or more painful than it is now.

Certain types of online fandoms, huh? That could mean, well, a lot of things, but I have my suspicions there...

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

The main one I recall was the slash pedophilia batch. (Harry Potter with Snape cartoon).

The most recent was the link hijacking.

I'm sure there were others. Meh.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's kind of what I thought. If they feel like they need to go elsewhere, more power to 'em. I certainly don't feel any need to follow them.